“[It is no little thing] to achieve anything in any art, to stand alone perhaps for many years, to go a path no other man has gone, to accept one’s own thought when the thought of others has the authority of the world behind it,…to give one’s life as well as one’s words which are so much nearer to one’s soul to the criticism of the world.”
W.B. Yeats
How many of us, hope and passion kindled by the 1960s, learned this the hard way! How many have still to learn it! W.B. Yeats, speaking of his youth in the section of Autobiographies titled “Four Years: 1887-1891” (pp 148-149)
Then gradually the attitude towards religion of almost everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject altogether, got upon my nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other with all the arrogance of raging youth. They attacked religion, I said, or some such words, and yet there must be a change of heart and only religion could make it. What was the use of talking about some new revolution putting all things right, when the change must come, if come it did, with astronomical slowness, like the cooling of the sun, or it may have been like the drying of the moon? Morris rang his chairman’s bell, but I was too angry to listen, and he had to ring it a second time before I sat down. He said that night at supper, “Of course I know there must be a change of heart, but it will not come as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because you were not being understood.” He did not show any vexation, but I never returned after that night; and yet I did not always believe what I had said, and only gradually gave up thinking of and planning for some near sudden change for the better.
“The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”
William Butler Yeats
Yeats at 43, in 1908 (from the Wikipedia article on him)
I got a pleasant surprise this morning when I went to my friend Rich Spees’ blog —
http://the-sacred-path.com/2008/03/05/our-life-as-a-tapestry/
— and found that he had used a painting I did (or TGU did, but they were using my fingers and I had paid for the canvas and paint!) to illustrate a concept that had been growing on him, the concept that our lives are tapestries.
I am not going to attempt to re-say here what he said very well there. Go read what he has to say. (And while you are there, take a look around. You’ll find it a very interesting site.)
In this political year, this relentlessly political year, I think back to a poem I wrote in another political year, in a fit of weary impatience. Liberal or conservative, I just don’t like sheep.
Libcon
It must be nice (as people say)
To always and automatically know
What not to have to think about anything,
And everything – to get the party line
From National Review, or Exquisite Corpse,
Or the Liberty Lobby or NPR—
To listen, or read, or overhear, and know
Just what precisely you can say and think
And just instinctively feel
To preserve your credentials as a paid-up
Member of the club, the chosen,
Intelligent, incorruptible, interchangeable few.
Political America divides in two:
On one side, the real world of ambiguity;
On the other side, the zealots, ever monitoring opinion,
Always quick to excommunicate.
In the midst of revising Babe in the Woods I came across a quote from Emerson that might almost be a commentary on our political season, and certainly is a commentary on our times. Written in August 1847, if you can believe it.
The Superstitions of our Age:
The fear of Catholicism;
The fear of pauperism;
The fear of immigration;
The fear of manufacturing interests;
The fear of radicalism or democracy;
And faith in the steam engine.
Antarctic ice loss between 1996 and 2006, overlaid on a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) mosaic image of Antarctica. The colors indicate the speed of the ice loss. Purple/red is fast. Green is slow. Image credit: NASA
Antarctica looks to us, on our maps, as one roughly circular continent. Ground-penetrating radar, however, shows it as two parts — to the East, the largest part, an elliptical-shaped mass. To the West, the Palmer peninsula and adjacent territories, actually an archipelago. Between the two, land that is actually below sea level. In other words, the ice conceals the fact that what seems to be one land mass is actually a land mass and adjacent islands.
I’m no scientist, but the map above seems to say that the ocean is reclaiming its own, melting the ice that does not sit on land. What does it say to you?